Murugan is first encountered through the mediation of another diaspora

subject, Antar, a New York based computer systems operator, who has been a former

colleague of Murugan’s and now works for an international water agency which has

absorbed LifeWatch. In the opening chapter Antar comes across a fragment of an ID card

on the screen of his computer and this sets him off on a quest to reconstruct the totality of

the card and then the recent life-history of its missing owner.

Antar looked as though it has been rescued from a fire. The lettering was mostly illegible

and the photograph had vanished under a smudge of soot. The card turned up in one of

those routine inventories that went flashing around the globe with metronomic regularity,

for no reason that he could understand.

Antar had been using his Ava for a couple of years now and he was still awed by

her eagerness of better herself. Anything she didn’t recognize she’d take apart on-screen,

producing microscopic structural analyses, spinning the images around and around,

tumbling them over, resting them over, resting on their side, producing ever greater

refinements of detail”[3].

Ava wouldn’t stop until Antar had told her everything he knew about whatever it

was that she was playing with on her screen.Antar tried routing her own encyclopedias,

somewhere along the line she had been programmed to hunt out real-time information, and

that was what she was determined to get.

Antar received a notice form his employer, the International Water

Council, telling him that his pay had been docked because of ‘declining productivity’,

warning him that a further decline could entail a reduction in his retirement benefits. He

didn’t dare take any more chances after that. He took the gadget with him walked to the

Penn Station. Antar’s retirement was only a year way and if his pension rates went down he

knew he wouldn’t be able to work them up again. For years he had been dreaming of

leaving New York and going back to Egypt [4].he recollects his wife who was no more

because an amniotic embolism killed her and the baby in the thirty-fifth week of her

pregnancy[13].

Antar was waiting to sign off when the card and chain showed up on the Ava’s

screen. The card on the screen resembled as he was familiar while he was working at

LifeWatch, which was a small but respected non-profit organization that served as a global

public health consultancy and epidemiological data bank. Antar had worked there much of

his life, as a programmer and system analyst. In a sense he worked there still except

LifeWatch had long since been absorbed, along with many other such independent

agencies, into the mammoth public health wing of the newly-formed International Water

Council. Like most of his colleagues, Antar had been assigned to an inconsequential ‘At

Home’ job to see him through to retirement [7]. They communicated with him through Ava

whenever they wanted.

He lingered over the chain for a moment. They hadn’t been around for years now

and he couldn’t quite recall when they were first introduced: probably some time in the

1980’s.he had been at LifeWatch for well over ten years. He had joined immediately after

graduating from Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow: this was in the days when the

Russians were still handing out scholarships to students from poor countries; when

Moscow was the best place in the world to study Linear Programming. LifeWatch had

advertised internationally for a programmer and analyst, to bring their accounts on line. It

was a number-crunching job, not what he had been trained for. It was safe, secure, settled,

and it offered an American salary and a guaranteed visa [8]. Antar rubbed his fingertips,

overcome by a tactile nostalgia, recalling the feel of those chains and those laminated

plastic ID cards.

It was years since he’d seen the once-familiar logo of LifeWatch, a neatly stylized

image of two intertwined laurel wreaths. Antar turned the card over, on Ava’s screen,

intrigued at the sight of the symbol, so well-known and so long forgotten. He brought the

card back on screen, life size, and blew it up, slowly. There couldn’t be any doubt about it:

it was a LifeWatch ID [9]. He began to wonder whom it had belonged to. He was sure he’d

know the name. Without thinking, he tapped in a sequence of commands. Ava’s screen

went momentarily blank as she began reconstructing the card, restoring the original.

Almost immediately Antar regretted the command. The process could take a while and later

he noticed that a word had appeared on the screen, under a line that said ‘Point of Origin’

[9].

Antar was curious when ‘Lhasa’ appeared on the screen. He tried to think back to

the eighties and nineties and whether LifeWatch had had an office there at the time. He

later came to know that Lhasa was the International Water Council’s continental command

centre for Asia. The Council’s officers called it the de facto capital of Asia because it had

the unique distinction of being the only command centre in the world that was in charge of

several major Hydraulic Regions. This meant to Antar that card could have entered the

system anywhere between Karachi and Vladivostok. He instructed Ava for a follow-up

narrative on the card’s chain of provenances. Ava took an instant longer than usual and

produced the name of the city where the card had been found. It was Calcutta [10].

The photograph on the ID card had begun to take shape in the centre of the living-

room, top downwards. The first detail to appear was a patch of hair, carefully trimmed, but

rather thin and discoloured. Then came a pair of bright black eyes. It occurred to Antar to

wonder whether he might be Egyptian, whoever he was: he could have been- but he could

just as well be Pakistani or India or Latin American [17].the man must be Indian, he was

sure of that. Antar wanted to know the name of the person on the ID. Ava could help him

out. It began to appear, a few seconds later, slowly, letter by letter, and then suddenly Antar

knew. Already, when there were no more than four letters in front of him, he had darted

over to Ava’s keyboard and fed it in; along with a search command. The name was

L.Murugan. On searching the last line, he remembered it now-he had typed it in himself,

just a few years ago.’ Subject missing since August 21, 1995’, it said, ‘last seen in Calcutta,

India’ [19].

Walking past St.Pauls’s Cathedral, on his first say in Calcutta, August 20,

1995, Murugan was caught unawares by a monsoon downpour. He was on his way to the

Presidency General Hospital, on Lower Circular Road, to look for the memorial to the

British scientist Ronald Ross. He had seen pictures of it and knew exactly to look for. It

was an arch, built into the hospital’s perimeter wall, near the site of Ross’s old laboratory.

It had a medallion with a portrait and an inscription that said: ‘in the small laboratory

seventy yards to the southeast of this gate Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross I.M.S. in 1898

discovered the manner in which malaria is conveyed by mosquitoes [20].

Turning away, he looked out through a window, at the walls of P.G.Hospital. In the

distance, hoping to catch a glimpse of the memorial to Ross. But just then the auditorium’s

loudspeakers came alive and a thin, rasping voice began to declaim. It forced itself on his

attention, insistent in its amplified gravity.

‘Every city has its secrets,’ The voice began, ‘but Calcutta, whose vocation is

excess, has so many that it is more secret than the other [21]. He noticed two women

running up the stairs. Murugan notices that both women had press tags pinned to their

shoulders, over their sarees. Both their tags bore the name of Calcutta magazine. Craning

his neck he saw that the younger woman was called Urmilla Roy, the tall, elegant one was

Sonali Das. Urmilla answered before Sonali could, in the hope that he would go away. ‘it is

an ward ceremony’, ‘For Phulboni, the writer – to mark his eighty-fifth birthday[23].’

Murugan said suddenly “Phulboni” is guy’s pen name. Sonali nodded. ‘His real name is

Saiyad Murad Hussain. He began writing under a pen-name because his father threatened

to disown him if he became a writer.’

Suddenly the writer’s voice rose, booming out of a loud-speaker.

‘Mistaken are those who imagine that silence is without life; that it is inanimate, without

either spirit or voice. It is not: indeed the Word is to this silence what the shadow is to the

foreshadowed, what the veil is to the eyes, what the mind is to the truth, and what language

is to life.’[24]

Urmilla had been working at Calcutta since she left college, three years

ago. She prided herself on dealing with hard news, on being the only woman on the

reporting desk. She no longer thought anything of storming into the Home Secretary’s

office in Writer’s Building, or of asking pointed questions at the Chief Minister’s press

conferences. When it came to Sonali Das she found herself becoming unaccustomedly shy

and tounge-tied.Sonali was such a presence in the city; the kind of person you read about in

film magazines and newspaper gossip columns.

The writer began to speak ‘the silence of the city,’ he said, ‘has sustained

me through all my years of writing: kept me alive in the hope that it would claim me too

before my ink ran dry. For more years than I can count I have wandered the darkness of

these streets, searching for the unseen presence that reigns over this silence, striving to be

taken in, begging to be taken across before my time runs out. the time of the crossing is at

hand, I know, and that is why I am here now, standing in front of you: to beg- to appeal to

the mistress of the silence, that most secret of deities, to give me what she has so long

denied: to show herself to me…’[17]

Antar sent off a message to the Council’s headquarters to let them know

he had found the ID card of a LifeWatch employee missing since August 21, 1995. In a few

minutes he discovered that the file consisted largely of notices and newspaper clippings

that had appeared at the time of L.Murugan’s ‘disappearance’. For the most part they

merely reproduced the gossip that had circulated in the office. At the time, Antar

remembered, everyone had assumed that ‘disappearance’ was just a euphemism for suicide

[19]. LifeWatch’s internal newsletter described Murugan as ‘missing’ rather than ‘dead’ he

was also referred by friends as ‘Morgan’. it described him as a ‘cocky little rooster of a

man’; it talked , not without fondness, of his combativeness, of how he could never resist

an argument , of his apparently unstoppable fluency; of the many contributions he had as

LifeWatch’s principal archivist.

He was a graduate student at Syracuse, the article said, that Morgan first

discovered the great love of his life: the medical theory of malaria. He spent several years

teaching in a small college in upstate New York, and during this time he came to be

increasingly interested in one highly specialized aspect of this subject: the early history of

malaria research. Later, even while working for LifeWatch he had seized every spare

moment to pursue this avenue of research- often to the detriment of his own career. He had

published little or nothing in those years, but he had often claimed, in his flippant way, that

he enjoyed the happy situation of being pre-eminent in his field by virtue of having it all to

himself.

The subject was the research career of the British poet, novelist and scientist, Ronald Ross.

Born in India in 1857, Ross was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1906 for his work on

the life-cycle of the malaria parasite. At the time it had been widely assumed that this

epochal discovery would lead to the eradication of what was possibly the world’s oldest

and most widespread disease: an expectation, alas, that had been sadly belied, as LifeWatch

had discovered to its cost. In occasional moments of seriousness, Murugan had been known

to admit his interest in this rather obscure subject had initially had a biographical origin.

The last crucial phase of Ronald Ross’s work was done in Calcutta, in the summer of 1898.

Murugan was himself born in that city, although he left it at an early age.

Possibly this biological connection had something to do with the obsessive nature

of Murugan’s interest in this subject. In 1987 he let some of his friends know that he had

finally written a summary of his research in an article entitled ‘Certain Systematic

Discrepancies in Ronald Ross’s account of Plasmodium B’. Murugan’s article ‘An

Alternative Interpretation of Late 19th Century Malaria Research: is there a Secret History?’

In 1989 Murugan wrote to the History of Science Society proposing a panel on early

malaria research for society’s next convention. When the proposal was rejected he sent

pages-long E-mail messages to the members of the review committee, jamming their mail

boxes.

A year later the society took the unprecedented step of revoking his membership. He was

warned that he would face legal action if he tried to attend any further meetings. It was

then that Murugan finally gave up trying to argue his case in public.

Murugan’s colleagues at LifeWatch treated his ‘research’ as a harmless if time-

consuming hobby: no one thought the worse of him for it, expect when it detracted from

his regular work. it was about this time that he began to speak openly about his notion of

the so-called ‘Other Mind’: a theory that some person or persons had systematically

interfered with Ronald Ross’s experiments to push malaria research in certain directions

while leading it away from others. His advocacy of this bizarre hypothesis gradually led

to his estrangement from several of his friends and associates.

Murugan believed that the developments in malaria research that occurred in the early

nineteen-nineties- such as a Patarryo’s immunological work and the breakthroughs in

research on antigenic variations in the plasmodium falciparum parasite- were almost a

century before. The turning point came in 1995 when he began to lobby to be sent to

Calcutta, the site of Ross’s discoveries: he was particularly intent on getting there before

august 20, the day that Ross had designated ‘ world Mosquito Day’, to commemorate

one of his findings.

Unfortunately LifeWatch had no office in Calcutta: or would it have been possible to

justify the expense of opening one purely for Murugan’s sake. However, when it became

clear that Murugan was determined to go even if it cost him his job, various people

within the organization put their heads together and manufactured a small research

project that would allow him to spend some time in Calcutta, although on a greatly

reduced salary. To Murugan’s great delight, the paperwork was concluded just in time to

allow him reach Calcutta on August 20, 1995.

Later, after Murugan’s ‘disappearance’ there were those who sought to blame LifeWatch

for allowing him to go at all. However, the fact was that the organization had done

everything in its power to dissuade him. Representatives of the Personnel Department, for

example, held several meetings with him in July 1995, shortly before his departure, trying

to argue him out of pursuing this project. But by this time the plan had become such an

idée fixe that in all likelihood nobody could have dissuaded Murugan from following the

course he had decided upon.

‘It is unnecessary therefore,’ the article continued, ‘to seek to blame Murugan’s well-

wishers at LifeWatch for the sad events of August 1995: it would be more appropriate to

join them in grieving for the loss of an irreplaceable friend.’

At the apex was a medallion, with Ronald Ross’s bearded head in profile. Under it, to the

right, was an inscription: ‘In the small laboratory seventy yards to the southeast of this

gate Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross, I.M.S. in 1898 discovered the manner in which malaria

is conveyed by mosquitoes.’ On the left, carved in marble, were three verses of Ross’s

poem, ‘In Exile’.

Murugan ran his eyes over the familiar lines:

This day relenting God

Hath placed within my hand

A wondrous thing’ and God,

Be praised. At His Command,

Seeking his secret deeds,

With tears and toiling breath,

I find thy cunning seeds,

O million-murdering Death.

I know this little thing

A myriad men will save.

O death where is thy sting?

Thy victory O grave?

Ronald Ross

Murugan began to laugh. Turning around he spread. His arms out and began to declaim,

from the same poem, in a deep, gleefully stentorian voice:

Half stunned I look around

And see a land of death—

Dead bones that walk the ground

And dead bones underneath;

A race of wretches caught

Between the palms of need

And rubbed to utter nought,

The chaff of human seed.

He was stopped by the second of hand-claps from the other side of the wide street. ‘Very

good Mister’, a voice called out.

The article in the LifeWatch newsletter was wrong on one point. There was only one

meeting between Murugan and a representative of the Personnel Department before

Murugan’s departure for Calcutta.

One morning Antar arrived at cubicle at LifeWatch’s headquarters on West 57th

Street to find the file waiting on his screen: it contained complete record of Murugan’s

requests for re-assignment. Antar was sure that the file had been routed to him by

mistake: he was only a technically member of personnel; he dealt almost exclusively with

accounts. He lost no time in shooting off a query to the Director of his department. A

couple of hours late the Director sent him a message asking him to drop by.

The director was a serious and conscientious Swede who never lost an

opportunity to remind his staff that their real business was caring . ‘Let’s get u away from

your screen for a bit’, he said to Antar. ‘I’ve got a more human job for you today’, He

called up Murugan’s file and took Antar through it. ‘See if u can’t talk some sense into

this man Murugan: hard economic sense I mean. Tell him about pension schemes and

medical benefits and all that sort of thing. You’ll see from the records that this gentleman

already pays out the third of his salary in alimony: effectively he’s not going to be

earning anything if he goes of to Calcutta on this wild-goose chase’.

Antar E-mailed Murugan that very afternoon.

A minute later appeared at the entrance to Murugan’s cubicle; a dapper, port-

bellied man, in a dark three-piece suit and felt hat. They were about the same age, Antar

estimated; both in their early forties. He explaining why a move to Calcutta would be a

career disaster.

Suddenly Murugan leaned forward, looking into Antar’s eyes. ‘You ever been

married Ant? He said.

Startled, Antar fell back in his chair. Without meaning to, he nodded.

‘No!’ Antar said vehemently. ‘My wife died, in her first pregnancy. . .’

‘That’s too bad’, said Murugan. ‘Were you together long?’

‘Yes’. The directness of the question took Antar off guard. ‘I was orphaned you see, and

her family kind of adopted me when I was in my teens, in Egypt. She was everything to

me. . . ‘He cut himself short flustered.

Murugan pulled a sympathetic face: ‘Shit happens.’ He glanced at his watch and

pushed his chair back. ‘Come on, let’s go grab a bite.’

Trying to turn the conversion away from himself, Antar said quickly: ‘and what

about u?’

‘My divorce was pretty straightforward’, Murugan said off-handedly as they

joined the lunchtime queue at the elevator bank. His voice seemed to grow louder as they

stepped into the elevator. ‘The whole things were a mistake – arranged by our families.

Didn’t last but a couple of years, No kids’.

Murugan gave a screech of laughter that went spiraling tinnily around the

elevator. ‘How did we get on this subject anyway?’ he said. ‘Oh yeah, you were telling

me I’m going to be a deadbeat divorce if I go to Calcutta.’

It was Antar who spoke first. ‘Why are you so determined to go to Calcutta?’ he blurted

out suddenly. He regretted it once he’d said it; he was not in the habit of inviting

confidences from strangers, especially someone as loud and brash as this. Yet, appalled

as he was by the man’s voice and manner, he couldn’t help feeling an inexplicable sense

of kinship with him.

‘Do something with your life?’ Antar said, on a note of derision. ‘What you’ll be doing is

throwing away all you prospect –at LifeWatch anyway.’

‘But look at it this way’, said Murugan. ‘You could find a thousand people – no, two

thousand … maybe ten – who could do what I’m doing now. But you won’t find another

person alive who knows more than I do about the subject I specialize in.’

His Stuff on malaria was about the only cutting-edge work he ever did. And even that

was a freak on-off thing. Do you know how long it took him?’

Antar answered with a polite shake of his head.

The actual research, the hand-on stuff, took just three years, door to door’ three years

spent entirely in India. He kicked off in the summer of 1895; in a little hoe-in-the-wall

army camp in a place called Secunderabad and ran the last few yards in Calcutta in the

summer of 1898. and for only about half that time was he actually in the lab. He spent

about five hundred days altogether working on malaria.

‘Look,’ said Murugan, ‘the great thing about a guy like Ronald Ross is that he writes

everything down. You’ve got to remember: this guy’s decided he’s going to re-write the

history books.

Medicine is the last thing on his mind, but he gets into the Indian Medical Service

anyway and the next thing you know he’s back in India toting a stethoscope and carving

up vets. So he coasts again, a couple of years, playing tennis, riding, same old same old.

He looks in the mirror and asks himself: what’s hot in medicine right now? What’s going

to bag me a Nobel? And what does the mirror tell him? You got it: malaria – that’s where

its at this season.

‘Did Ross have malaria himself?’ Antar asked.

Have you ever had it yourself?’

Antar nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a long time ago, in Egypt.’

Murugan sat up. ‘That’s funny’, he said. ‘The malaria rates are pretty low in Egypt.’

‘I suppose I was an exception’, said Antar.

Murugan laughed. ‘ But you know, I don’t worry about it too much. I guess it’s because

malaria isn’t just a disease. Sometimes it’s also a cure.’

‘A cure?’ Antar said. ‘For what?’

‘Ever heard of Julius von Wagner – Jauregg?’

‘He won the Nobel too; for stuff he did with malaria. He was even born the same year as

Ronnie Ross, but in Austria. He was a psychologist: had a couple of serious run-ins with

Freud. But the reason his name is up there in the bright lights is that he discovered

something about malaria that Ross couldn’t even have begun to guess at.’

What?’ said Antar.

‘He discovered that artificially induced malaria could cure syphilis – at least in the

dementia paralytic stage when it attacks the brain.’

‘It sound incredible’, said Antar.

‘Sure’, said Murugan. ‘But it still got him the Nobel in 1927. Artificially induced malaria

was the standard treatment for syphilitic paresis until the forties. Fact is malaria does

stuff to the brain that we’re still just guessing at.’

‘But to come back to Ross’. Said Antar. ‘You say he didn’t catch malaria until he was

well into his work? So what got him interested in it then?’

‘It was the zeitgeist’, said Murugan. ‘Malaria was the cold fusion of his day; the Sunday

papers were scrambling to get it on their covers. And it figures: malaria’s probably the all

time biggest killer among diseases. Next to the common cold it’s just about the most

prevalent disease on the planet. We’re not talking about a disease which shoots off the

chart suddenly some century like the plague or small-pox or syphilis. Malaria’s been

around since the bit band or thereabouts, pegged at about the same level all longs.

There’s no place on earth that’s off the malaria map; Arctic Circle, freezing mountaintop,

burning desert, you name it, malaria’s there. We’re not talking millions of cases here;

more like hundreds of millions. We don’t even know how many, because malaria’s so

widespread it doesn’t always get on the charts. And besides, it’s a master of disguise: it

can mimic the symptoms of more diseases than you can begin to count – lumbago, the

‘flu, cerebral hemorrhage, yellow fever. And even when it’s properly diagnosed it’s not

like quinine is always going to get you home safe. With certain kinds of malaria you can

mainline quinine all the livelong day and come nightfall you’ll still be gathering freezer-

burn in the mortuary. It’s only fatal in a fraction of all reported cases but when you’re

dealing with hundreds of millions, a fraction adds up to the population of an economy-

size country.’

‘The mid-nineteenth century was when the scientific community began to wake up to

malaria. Remember this was the century when old Mother Europe was settling all the

Last Unknowns: Africa, Asia, Australia, the Americas, even uncolonized parts of herself

And this was just about the time that new sciences like bacteriology and parasitology

were beginning to make a splash in Europe Malaria went right to the top of the research

agenda. Government began to pour money into malaria research – in France, in Italy, in

the US, everywhere except England. But did Ronnie let that stop him? No sir, he just

stripped off and jumped right in.’

Antar frowned:

‘Your mean Ross didn’t have any official support from the British government?’ when it

came to malaria the British were non-starters: the front-line work was being done in

France and the French colonies, Germany, Italy, Russia, and America – anywhere but

where the Brits were. But you thing Ross cared? You’ve got to hand it to the guy,

he’s got a job in this dinky little outfit, the Indian Medical Service, which gets a couple of

copies of Lancet and nothing else, not even the Transactions of the Royal Society of

Tropical Medicine, forget about the Johns Hopkins Bulletin or the Annals of the Pasteur

Institute. But our Ronnie doesn’t give a shit: he gets out of bed one sunny day in

Secunderabad or wherever and says to himself, in his funny little English accent, “Dear

me, I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself today, think I’ll go and solve the

scientific puzzle of the century, kill a few hours”. He beat them all. Or that’s the official

story anyway: anyway: young Ronnie, the lone genius, streaks across the field and runs

away with the World Cup’

I’ll tell you what Ant’, said Murugan,

I’ve got to write an article about him’, said Urmila. ‘ And I’ve been wondering about a

couple of things. Someone told me that you might be the person to talk to.’ ‘Alipore’, she

said to the driver, and then rolled her window down as the taxi trundled past the cool

darkness of the Race Course[51].

Scribbling a date of the restaurant’s brightly coloured paper napkin, Murugan placed it

before Anatar.

‘Here’s the deal’, he said. ‘It’s so hot the floors are military hospital in Secunderabad, its

so hot the floors are shimmering, no fans, no electricity, a roomful of jars, all neatly

stacked up on shelves, a desk with a straight, backed chair, a single microscope with

slides scattered about, one guy, in uniform hunched over the microscope and a swarm of

orderlies buzzing around him. That’s Ronnie and the other guys are the chorus line, or so

Ronnie thinks anyway. “Do this” he says and they do it. “Do that” he says and they

scramble. That’s what he’s grown up with, that’s what he’s used to.

‘Wait a minute’, Anatar interrupted. ‘May 1995? So Ronald Roos is at the beginning of

his malaria research?

‘That’s right’, said Murugan. ‘Ronnie’s just got back from a vacation in England. While

he was over there, he met with Patrick Manson, in London.’

‘Patrick Manson?’ Anatar raised an eyebrow. ‘Do you mean the Manson of

elephantiasis?’

‘That’s the man’, said Murugan. ‘Manson’s one of the all time greats; he’s lived in China

so long he can skin a python with chopsticks; he’s the guy who wrote the book on filarial,

the bug that causes elephantiasis. Now he’s back in England where he’s become the

Queen’s head honcho in bacteriological research. Doc Manson wants to get the malaria

prize – for Britain, he says, for the Empire : fuck those krauts and fromgs and wops and

yanks. He may be a Scot but come

‘If I remember correctly.’ Antar said, ‘Manson proved that the mosquito was the vector

for filarial. Am I right?’

‘Right’, said Murugan. ‘Now he’s got a hunch that the mosquito has something to do

with the malaria bug too. He doesn’t have time to do the work himself so he’s looking for

someone to carry the torch for Queen and Empire. Guess who walks in? Ronnie Ross.

Trouble is Ronnie’s not exactly a front-runner at this point. Way back in the 1940s a guy

called Meckel found microscopic granules of black pigment in the organs of malaria

patients – black spots, some round, some crescent – shaped, tucked inside tiny masses of

protoplasm. For forty years no one can figure out what this stuff is. The breakthrough

comes in 1880 : Alphonse laveran, a French army surgeon in Algeria, runs out to get

wome lunch, leaving a plate cooking under his scope. He gets back from his hickory-

grilled merguez and guess what? One of those crescent shaped granules is moving. He

sees it beginning to jive, turning into a miniature octopus, throwing out tentacles, shaking

the whole cell. ‘so Laveran puts two and two together: hey, this thing moves, it’s a but.

He faxes the Academy of Medicine in Paris; tells them he’s found the cause of malaria

and it’s a critter, a protozoan – an animal parasite. But Paris doesn’t buy it. Pasteur’s the

boss out there and he’s sent the smart money chasing after bacteria. No one buys

Laveran’s protozoan criter: it’s like he said he found the yeti. Some of the biggest name

in medicine get busy refuting “Laveranity”. The only converts are the Italians: they

becomes born-again Laveranities. In 1886 Camillo Golgi shows that Laveran’s parasite

grows inside the red blood cell, eating its host and shitting black pigment; that the

pigment collects in the centre while the bug begins to divide; he demonstrates that the

recurrence of malarial fevers is linked to this pattern of asexual reproduction. Antar broke

in: ‘So it was Manson who was responsible for conceiving of the connection between

malaria and mosquitoes?’

‘It wasn’t exactly a new idea’, said Murugan. ‘Most cultures that had to deal with malaria

knew there was some connection.’

‘But, Antar persisted, ‘you’re saying it’s Manson who first gave Ross the idea?’

‘You could say Manson pointed in the general direction’, route. He had this screwball

theory that the malaria bug was transmitted from mosquito to man via drinking water. His

plan was to get Ronnie to do the grunt work on this theory of his.’

When he pulls into Begumpett the he begins to offer money for samples of malarial blood

– real money, one rupee per prick! There’s so much malaria in this place, the mosquitoes

are doing double shifts and can’t keep up.

One may 17, 1895, just when it begins to look really hopeless, he gets his first perfect

case of malaria -–a patients called Abdul Kadir. Ronnie goes into high gear: he strips

Abdul Kadir, shoves him into a bed, drapes a wet mosquito net over him and releases a

test-tube full of mosquitoes into it. Next morning he harvests his crop and suddenly

Ronnie’s laboratory is the happening place in Begumpett. Until then he’s observed only

two of the flagellate forms of the parasite. On May 18 he flattens one of Abdul Kadir’s

mosquitoes (mosquito # 18) and he finds sixty parasites in a single field. He’s so excited

he does back flips all the way to his desk. He’s found a “wonder case” he writes Doc

Manson. That’s just the beginning. The first time Ronnie sees the crescent – sphere

transformation of the parasite is on June 26, 1895, in Abdul Kadir’s blood. Over the next

couple of months Abdul Kadir’s blood over the next couple of months Abdul Kadir’s

blood guides him through all the critical phases of his research.

Anyway, on May 25 1895 at exactly 8 p.m. a guy called Lutchman walks into Ronnie’s

life. He volunteers to drink Rhonie’s cocktail. Ronnie pops the corks and breaks out the

mosquito margarita.

All he knows about Lutchman is that he’s a “dhooley – bearer” :in other words the British

government pays him to shovel shit.

‘Lutchman has a fever next morning: 99.8o at 8 a.m. (“Looking ill”, Ronnie notes).

Look’s like it’s time for Doc Manson to jump out of his bathtub; maybe malaria really is

spread through mosquito – dust. A day later he’s so fit he could run the Begumpett

marathon: no sigh of malaria in his blood. In April 1897, Ron takes a break in the Nilgiri

Hills. Ron goes down to the Wesbury coffee estate in a valley, looking for malaria

parasites, and there for the first time in him life, he gets malaria he’s never even heard the

word anopheles. He ends up chasing after Culex, Stegomyia – going every which way but

ahead. Now Lutchman cuts in once again. On Auguest 15, 1897, he goes into a huddle

with the rest of his crew and decides something’s got to be done double quick.

It said: ‘The Robinson Guest House’. Beneath it was a nameplate for’N.Aratounian’.

Now Grigson’s sure his name’s not really Lutchman: he’s changed it to make it look like

he’s from the area. Grigson’s got it figured that this is one of the commonest names there

is, except that what’s “Lutchman” in one place is Laakhan somewhere else and

Lookhkhon in another place, and Lakshaman in still another: depending on which part of

the country you’re from.

Murugan Said. ‘You know all about matter and anti-matter, right? And rooms and

anterooms and Christ and anti Christ and so on? Now, let’s say there was something like

science and counter-science? Thinking of it in the abstract, wouldn’t you say that the first

principle of a functioning counter-science would have to be secrecy? The way I see it, it

wouldn’t just have to be secretive about what it would also have to be secretive in what it

did. It would have to use secrecy as a technique or procedure. It would in principle have

to refuse all direct communication, straight off the bat, because to communicate, to put

ideas into language would be to establish a claim to know – which is the first thing that a

counter – science would dispute.’ Knowledge couldn’t begin without acknowledging the

impossibility of knowledge. Then what these guys were after was much bigger; they were

after the biggest prize of all, the ultimate transcendence of nature.’

‘And what might that be?’ Antar asked politely.

‘Immortality’, said Murugan. Murugan said. ‘What I’m really talking about is a

technology for interpersonal transference.’

‘Hey guys,’ Murugan protested. ‘Didn’t I say it was an experiment? Where’s your spirit

of inquiry?’ ‘If there is a Calcutta chromosome I’ve got to find it. I guess I need it more

than you do.’

He’d had a good job once, with a British firm, Palmer Brothers, but he gave it up when

he started writing. He wanted to make his living as a writer but his work was just too

difficult for the public: all thost dialect words from languages no one had ever heard of.

His fater worked for one of those mountain maharajas in Orissa and he grew up in the

jungle, speaking the language of the local people, running wild. That’s why he later took

the pen – name Phulboni, after the region.

‘Living in the forest, he must have learned to shoot very early, but he never told anyone

about it. It was quite by accident that I discovered that he was an excellent shot.

‘You remember I mentioned a guy called W.G. Maccallum – a doctor and research

scientist who made one of the big breakthroughs in malaria in 1897?. He wrote a paper

fast as he could and presented it at a big doctor’s convention in Toronto in 1897.

MacCallum was the first to figure it out. But back when he was getting started on his

research, he worked with a whole team down at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.

The-Vice-President was in Calcutta earlier today’, he announced, ‘to present the

National Award to the eminent writer Saiyad Murad Husain, better known by his nom de

plume, Phulboni.’ Abruptly the newreader’s face disappeared from the screen, to be

replaced by the Vice-President’s, nodding sleepily on the stage of the Rabindra Sadan

Auditorium.

Suddenly the writer’s hoarse, rasping voice filled the room; ‘For more years than I can

count I have walked the innermost streets of this most secret of cities, looking always to

find her who has so long eluded me: Silence herself. I see signs of her presence

everywhere I go, in images, words, glance, but only signs, nothing more…

Watching carefully, Farley saw her picking the slides out with a speed that indicated she

was not only thoroughly familiar with the slides but knew exactly what they contained.

His mind began to spill over with questions: how had a woman, and an illiterate one at

that, acquired such expertise? And how had she succeeded in keeping it secret from

Cunningham? And how was it that she, evidently untrained and anwaware of any of the

principles on which such knowledge rested, had come to exercise such authority over the

assistant?

‘Mangala?’ said Cunningham, pointing his pipe-stem over his shoulder..

‘If that is her name, yes.’

‘If you’re asking me how I found her.’ Cunningham said, ‘the answer is I found her

where I find all my bearers and assistant: at the new railway station – what do they call

it? – oh yes, Sealdah.’

That’s the place to go if you need a willing worker: always said so- it’s fill of people

looking for a job and a roof over their heads. See for yourself the next time you’re there.’

‘But sir,’ Farley exclaimed, ‘to take on untrained and uneducated…

‘And who better to train one’s assistants than oneself, my boy? Cunningham countered.

‘Far preferable, in my opinion, to being surrounded by over-eager and half-formed

college students. One is spared the task of imparting much that is useless and

unnecessary.’

Cunningham said. ‘I believe the place is called Renupur – you may have passed it on

your way here.’

‘Why yes’, said Farley. ‘I passed through Renupur on my way to Calcutta.’ he said; ‘Here

me well: I shall not leave this laboratory until I have seen tha transformations that

Laveran described. I am willing to stay here all night, if need be: I shall stay as long as I

must.’

His eyes locked with Mangala’s; she was standing in front of all the others, staring at

him, smiling to herself. Clutched in her had, in full view, was the body of the decapitated

bird, the blood still oozing from its macabre wound.

‘Tell him,’ the woman said with a mocking smile, ‘tell him that what he sees is the

creature’s member entering the body of its mate, doing what men and women must do…’

Fareley flung the slides at the woman and stalked quickly out of the laboratory.

But Elijah Farley never reached Barich: he disappeared during the journey, never to be

seen again. The police discovered that he had indeed boarded the train at Sealdah, as

scheduled, but had disembarked before his destination – at a remote, rarely – used station

called Renupur, in severe monsoon weather. A guard was said to have reported later that

a young man had been seen carrying his luggage.

Abruptly Ava began to beep: Rest indecipherable, unable to continue…

I WAS SEVAN fifteen in the morning and Urmila was nearing the end of her tether. She

was in the kitchen, grinding spices, perspiration dripping off her face on to her grease-

spotted saree.

She would have to leave within the hour if she was to be on time for the press conference

at the Great Eastern Hotel.

What do you want?’ she said again, more evenly.

The young man was squatting beside the basket now. With another smile he pulled back a

layer of paper and plastic to reveal a pile of fish, gleaming silver in the early morning

light. He grinned. ‘I just came to ask weather you need any fish this morning didi’, he

said. ‘That’s all.

‘I sell to all the best houses. Why, do you know Romen Haldar’s house, in the next lane?’

Urmila looked up, raising an eyebrow.

‘Let me tell you’, he said proudly. ‘They buy all their fish from me. Only from me: you

can go and ask if you like.’

She touched a piece of fish gingerly and the tip of her finger came away with a bit of

paper attached. She had trouble shaking it off; it had dissolved into a wad of sticky glue.

Wrinkling her nost in disgust, she stole a quick glance out of the window. RashBehari

Avenue was jammed with buses and minibuses, all belching thick clouds of smoke. She

had no more than half an hour to spare of she was to get to the Great Eastern Hotel in

time for the press conference. She began to scrub furiously.

She threw up her hands, thoroughly irritated now, and peeled a scrap of paper off her

fingers. It was thin, cheap Xerox paper: the kind that accumulated in vast quantities in the

Calcutta copying room.

It was a large, legal-size photocopy of page of very fine English newsprint. The typeface

was unfamiliar, old fashioned: she knew at a glance that the page wasn’t from any of the

current English – language papers printed in Calcutta. She made space for it on a shelf

and spread it out.

The masthead said, The Colonial Services Gazette, in beautiful “Gothic characters.

Beside the name was a dateline: ‘Calcutta, the twelfth of January, 1898.’ The page was

divided into eight columns, each containing dozens of announcements of a routine kind:

‘D. Attwater Esq. transferred to Almora as Deputy Magistrate, Revenues’, ‘So-and-so to

quit his post in the Port Authority, Calcutta, in order to become Assitant Harbourmaster

in Singapore’ and so on.

Squinting at the page she read: ‘Leave approved for surgeon – Colonel D.D.

Cunningham, Presidency General Hospital, Calcutta, January 10-15…’

She found herself pulling out the two other bits of paper left in the plastic bag.

The next page was even more puzzling than the first. It was a copy of a sheet of paper

with a list of name sunder an elaborate and unfamiliar logo. Holding the logo up to the

light, she saw that it said ‘South – Western Railways’. Hand written beneath it were the

words: ‘January 10,1898, passenger list, Compartment 8.’ Under this was a list of names.

Urmila looked quickly through them; they seemed like British names. She read a couple

of them to herself, spelling them out slowly: ‘Major Evelyn Urquhard, D. Craven, Esq.,

Sir Andrew Acton, C.I.E….’ Then she noticed that a name at the bottom of the list had

been underlined. It was: C.C. Dunn, Esq’.

That’s strange, she thought. The other name was D.D. something.

It was a coy of another page of the Colonial Services Gazette. This one was dated

January 30,1898. she cast a quick glance over it: another long list of transfers, leaves

approved, positions filled. Again one of the announcements was underlined. It read: ‘The

public is notified that Surgeon – Coloneal D.D. Cunningham is currently on leave

pending his retirement. He will be replaced by Surgeon – Major Ronald Ross of the

Indian Medical Service.

She was furious with herself now for wasting so much time staring at used Xerox paper.

The paper – wrapped fish had turned into a stinking, glutinous mess. It was all she could

do no to vomit into the sink

She was so angry now that she stopped caring about the time sbout the press conference

at the Great Eastern, the news editor, even the Minister of Communications from Delhi.

She stuffed the pieces of fish back into the plastic bag and marched to the door. On her

way out she snatched up the sheets of Xerox paper, crumpling them into a ball, in her fist.

A portly chowkidar in khaki uniform was on guard at the gate. Right above him was an

elaborately carved marble name-plate, set deep in the wall. It bore the name ‘ Romen

Haldar’ written in richly ornamented, cursive Bengali. No appointment today – all

appointments have been cancelled.’

Urmila ignored him. ‘I want to see Mr. Romen Haldar’. She said. The Secretary glowered

at her, over the rim of his spectacles. ‘What business do you have with Mr. Haldar?’ he

asked.

‘Let me tell you: my name is Urmila Roy and I am a Calcutta reporter. Perhaps you

should think a little before you do anything. Gradually, as her vision cleared she saw that

the large blur in front of her was a face, the face of a man, a man with a short, trimmed

beard. He looked somehow familiar. Miss Calcutta!’ he was shaking her shoulder. ‘Come

on, wake up. Where’d you get these? I’ve got to know.’

These’, he said impatiently. ‘This stuff you brought with you; these papers.’ He looked at

her nonplussed. ‘Don’t you remember me?’ he said. ‘We met that day, at that

auditorium.; ‘I don’t know you name, ‘I’m L. Murugan’, he said. ‘I work for LifeWatch.’

Murugan took out his walled and handed her a card. ‘ I know who you are’, he said. ‘I

don’t recall the name exactly, but I know you work for Calcutta magazine.’

‘Me?’ said Murugan. ‘I wanted to ask Mr. Haldar’s permission to visit his Robinson

Street property, so I thought I’d come and introduce myself.’

‘Can you tell me?’ ‘How dare you?’ she cried. She lunged at his hand and snatched the

papers away. ‘These are mine. They belong to me.’ He ran to the road and stopped a taxi.

‘P.G. Hospital’, he said, to the Sikh driver. ‘Quick; let’s go. Suddenly she was furious.

‘What does the P.G. Hospital have to do with my pieces of paper?’ she said, turning upon

Murugan. ‘Why are you taking me there? What are your intentions.?’

‘You wanted an explanation, Calcutta’, Murugan said. ‘ And you want to begin at the

P.G. Hospital?’ she said.

‘That’s night’, he said. ‘That’s why I’m taking you there.’ When they reached the

Rabindra Sadan auditorium Murugan tapped the driver on the shoulder and pointed down

the road. ‘Over there’, he said. ‘Stop, over there.’

‘But there’s nothing to see here’, Urmila said suspiciously. ‘It’s just a wall.’ ‘Look over

there’, said Murugan, counting his change. He pointed over his shoulder at the memorial

to Ronald Ross.

‘Did you get an eyeful of that?’

Urmila eyes widened in surprise as they followed his finger to the marble plaque at the

apex of the modest little arch. ‘No’, she said. ‘I’ ve never noticed it before.’ She began

reading aloud: ‘ In the small laboratory seventy yards to the southeast of this gate

Surgeon-Major Ronald Ross, I.M.S. in 1898 discovered the manner in which malaria is

conveyed by mosquitoes.’

She shook her head. ’It’s strange’,she said. ‘I’ve changed buses here hundreds of times. I

can’t even begin to count how often I’ve walked past this wall. But I’ve never noticed

that inscription up there.’

‘No one notices poor Ron any more’, said Murugan. ‘When Ronald Ross came to work

here in 1898’, Murugan said, ‘that building over there was all there was of the P.G.

Hospital. ‘None of those was here when Ronnie was doing his malaria research in

Calcutta. It was just trees and bamboo and greenery around here – expect for a couple of

labs and outhouses where the servants and attendants lives.’ He held a handkerchief to his

nose as they walked past an open rubbish dump where crows, dogs and vultures were

fighting over scraps of food and blood-soaked bandages. Urmila said. ‘ Doesn’t it say that

it was in this laboratory that Surgeon – Major Ronald Ross made the momentous

discovery that malaria is conveyed by the bite of mosquito?’

‘Something like that’, said Murugan.

He pointed to one of the lines that had been marked in ink. ‘that’s him. Suregon-Colonel

D.D. Cunningham.’ That’s the guy who set up this place’, said Murugan. ‘Like Ronnie

Ross he was doctor in the Indian Medical Service, which was a nunit of the British Indian

Army. But Cunningham was more or less a senior citizen, years older than Ross. And he

was a research scientist too - pathologist. In fact he was a Fellow of the Royal Society;

he had an F.R.S. tagged to him name, which was one of the fanciest tags you could get

those days. ‘You see those outhouses over there?’ he said. ‘that’s where Ronnie Ross’s

servants lived. One of them, a guy called Lutchman, was Ross’s right-hand man. He used

to breed the pigeons that Ross used for his research right over there.’

‘Pigeons?’ said Urmila distractedly, casting a distasteful glance at the little heaps of

excrement that lay half-hidden in the debris. ‘I thought you said he was working with

mosquitoes and malaria.’

In Calcutta he began working with a related avian species, halteridium – you could call it

a bird version of malaria.’

And they released their entire flock here, in September 1898, just days after Ross finished

his final series of experiments.’ ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised’ he said, ‘if there were a

couple of descendants of Lutchman’s flock up there.’ ‘Was it this man D.D. Cunningham

who invited him here?’ ‘No’, said Murugan. ‘Exactly the opposite. On January 30 the

Government of India finally approved Ronnie Ross’s transfer to Calcutta. ‘But it’s clear

that something happened round the middle of January 1898 that made Cunningham

change his mind. And it was no accident either: somebody worked pretty hard to set it

up.’ Urmila examined her papers again.

‘It says here that D.D. Cuningham was granted five days’ leave in the middle of January

– from the 10th to the 15th February. That’s when it must have happened.’

Urmila shivered, despite the clammy hear. ‘so do you think it’s all connected?’ she said.

Murugan said. ‘You bet they’re connected. Your fish wrappings pull it all together.

Suddenly in January 1898, Cunningham changes his mind; he throws the game and takes

his tail off to England. In between he makes a pit-stop in Madras where he goes thought

some kind of psychotic episode. Those papers, that message on my screen – someone is

trying to get me to make connections: they want me to know I was on the right track.’

‘That’s right’, said Murugan. ‘Fact is we’re dealing with a crowd for whom silence is a

religion. We don’t even know what we don ‘t know who’s in this and who’s not; we

don’t know how much of the spin they’ve got under control. We don’t know how many

of the threads they want us to pull together and how many they want to keep hanging for

whoever comes next.’ Today the Minister of Communication announced at a press

conference that he believed strongly that communications were the key to india’s future.

Murugan said ‘If I had to take a guess, I’d say that that was the demi-urge of Ron’s

discovery’, he said. ‘ My guess is that she’s the one behind this whole experiment. ‘There

is’, the girl nodded vigorously. ‘Today is the last day of the puja of Mangala-bibi. Baba

says that tonight Mangala-bibi is going to enter a new body.’Who is this Lachman you

keep talking about?’

‘You mean Lutchman’, Murugan corrected her. ‘The way Farley saw it,’ said Murugan,

‘it was the people in the lab, Cunningham’s servants and assistants. ‘Cunningham’s

assistants were a pretty wild mix. You see, he didn’t want educated college kids from

Calcutta messing around in his lab, and asking questions and stuff. So what he did instead

was he’d train his own assistants.’

At Sealdah railway station. The station hadn’t been around that long, but if you wanted to

find people who were pretty much on their own, down and out with nowhere to go, that

was the place to look. They’d jump at it of course: what did they have to lost? They’d

live in those outhouses near the hospital wall, and help around the lab. My guess is that

within a few years she was way ahead of Cunningham in her intuitive understanding of

the fundamentals of the malaria problems.’ ‘I guess you could call her a prototype’, said

Murugan. He found her at Sealdah station, that she was dirt poor and that she probably

had hereditary syphilis. She was working towards something altogether different, and

she’d begun to believe that the only way she was going to make her final break through

was by getting Ronnie Ross to make his. She had bigger things in mind than the malaria

bug.’ The Calcutta chromosome.’

The Calcutta chromosome’, said Murugan. That’s my name for what she was working

towards. ‘Farley’s account it seems there was an underground network of people who

believed that she possessed cure. Remember that we’re talking about the 1890s – long

before the discovery of penicillin. Sysphilis was untreatable and incurable: it killed

millions of people every year, all around the world. These people who came to see

Mangala may have belived that she was a witch or a magician or a god or whatever: it

doesn’t matter – the conventional medical treatments for syphilis at that time weren’t

much more than hocus-pocus either. ‘Enter Mangala: it looks like she hit up on this

treatment too, at about the same time as the Herr Doktor. Mangala began to notice that

her treatment often produced weird side – effect – what looked like strange personality

disorders. Mangala stumbled on something that neither she nor Ronnie Ross nor any

scientist of that time would have had a name for. For the sake of argument let’s call it a

chromosome: why I call it the Calcutta chromosome.

‘One of the reasons why the Calcutta chromosome can’t be found by normal methods is

because, unlike the standard chromosomes, it isn’t present in every cell. Or if it is, it’s so

deeply encrypted that our current techniques can’t isolate it. Biologists are under so much

the spectrum. One of the extraordinary things about the malaria bug is that it has the

capacity to “cut and past” its DNA – unlike any creature we know of except the

trypanosome. Remember that’s one of the reasons why it’s been so hard to develop a

malaria vaccine. Because what’s special about the malaria bug is that, as it goes through

its life-cycle, it keeps altering its coat-proteins. So by the time the body’s immune system

learns to recognize the threat, the bug’s already had tome to do a little costume-change

before the next act. Said Murugan. ‘She’s not in this because she wants to be a scientist.

She’s in this because she thinks she’s a god. And what that means is that she wants to be

the mind that sets things in motion. The way she sees it, we can’t ever know her, or her

motives, or anything else about her: the experiment won’t work unless the reasons for it

are utterly inscrutable to us, as unknowable as a disease. But at the same inscrutable to

us, as unknowable as a disease. Any connection between Mangala and Lutch-man ‘Farley

says there was another guy working with Mangala at Cunningham’s lab. He seems to

have been about the same age as Lutchman and he fits the same general profile.’ What

was the name of the station where Farley and the assistant were last seen?’ ‘Renupur’,

said Murugan.

She started at him soundlessly. ‘Last night I went home with Sonali di and she told me

something: a story she’d heard from her mother, about something that happened to

Phulboni many years ago.’ Phulboni was working for a well-known British firm, Palmer

Brothers, which made soaps and oils and other household goods. Typically, he had spent

his first month’s salary on a new.303 rifle. Now he was looking forward to the prospect

of putting the gun to use. At that very moment he heard a scream, a raging, inhuman howl

that tore through the stormy night. It hurled a single word into the wind- ‘Laakhn’ – and

then it was silenced by the thunder of the speeding train. There is not much else to tell’,

the guard said. ‘what people say is that he hid himself on a train and went to Calcutta.

They say he was living at Sealdah station when a woman found him and gave him a

home.’ As a sahib, naturally, the foreigner was in first class while this other man was in

third, but now he could not find the young man: he had disappeared. My predecessor

could not help him; he hadn’t noticed anyone else getting off at Renupur. The foreigner

was very annoyed and said he would wait at the station. ‘I’ve got news for you Calcutta’,

Murugan said. ‘I saw her after you did.’ ‘Why are you going on with this? What’s kept

you at it so long?’ ‘Can’t you tell?’ Murugan said.

Urmila shook her head: ‘No.’

Murugan gave her a grim smile. ‘It’s not me’, he said. ‘It’s what’s inside me.’

‘Do you mean Malaria?’

‘That too’, said Murugan’

‘What else?’ said Urmila..

There was a brief pause, and then in an undertone, Maurgan said: ‘Syphilis.’

He was starting at Antar with bloodshot, grime-caked eyes; his lips drawn back in a grin,

baring yellow, decaying teeth.

‘What’s the matter?’ a voice cried out suddenly, filling the room through Ava’s

concealed sound outlets. ‘You wanted to see me, didn’t you? I’m just a little early, that’s

all.’

Where have you been? The figure shouted after him. ‘Why have you kept me waiting so

Long?’ ‘Put me down you bastard’, he shouted. ‘Look me in the eye.’

‘Who are you?’ snapped Urmila. ‘And what are you doing in Mrs Aratounian’s flat?

The man gave him a look puzzled enquiry, spectacles glinting. ‘Don’t you know?’ he

said. ‘She sold everything. To the New Russell Exchange. That is why I am here: I am

the head clerk in charge of collections and evaluations.’ ‘But it was all here last night.

Everything was here when I went out this morning. She couldn’t have sold it all today.’

The letterhead said: ‘New Russell Exchange, Auctioneers and Valuers.’ The margin of

each page was covered with a patchwork of legal stamps, initials and signatures.

The clerk hummed as he flipped through the document. He stopped at the end, with a

trump hat cry. ‘Here’, he said. ‘Do you see? The contract was signed and sealed exactly a

year ago, to the day. Mrs Aratounian sold everything on these premises on an as-is-where

–is basis, subject to the stipulation that collection would occur exactly a year later.’

Murugan re-appeared, thrusting himself between them. ‘I have another question for you’,

he said. ‘Did Mrs Aratounian leave any papers behind? Any Xeroxes, old newspaper

cuttings anything?’ When did Mrs Aratounian give you that?’ Murugan demanded. ‘And

why?’

‘She said if anyone came here to tell them…’

‘Tell them what?;

The clerk squinted at the little slip. ‘That she was going to catch a train at eight thirty’, he

said. ‘To Renupur, from Sealdah.’ ‘There’s something you don’t know either’, Sonali

said. ‘What?’

‘That Phulboni is my father’, said Sonali. ‘With Phulboni and Romen gone, what will I

stay for?’ ‘Phulboni is your father madame? Oh my god! What will they say at the film

Society?’

‘I want you to promise me something Calcutta’, he said.

‘What?’ said Urmila. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Promise me Calcutta’, he said. ‘Promise me that you’ll take me across if I don’t make it

on my own.’

‘But promise anyway’, Murugan insisted. ‘Promise You’ll take me, even if they want you

to leave me behind?’

‘Why would anyone want to leave you behind?’ said Urmila. ‘You’re the only one who

knows what’s happened, what’s happening. You said yourself that someone had gone to a

lot of trouble to help you make connections.’

Urmila laughed. She put a hand on his head and an arm around Sonali’s shoulders. ‘Don’t

worry’, she said. ‘I’ll take you both with me, wherever I go.

‘Sure is’, said Murugan. ‘I’ve waited a long time to get in touch with you. I figured

nothing would be quite as quick as that ID card.’

‘But people have been looking for you for years.’, said Antar. ‘Where have you been?’

‘I’ve asked you this before’, said Murugan. ‘And I’ll ask again. Are you sure you want to

know?’